by Brian Harmon
But he was finding himself more convinced that something else was going on here, something very unnatural.
He turned onto his side and stared down at the floor. The moonlight and streetlamps illuminated the window behind the pulled shades enough to see the shadowy shapes of the things in the room, but not enough to see anything clearly.
He stared down at a dark shape on the floor, his thoughts circling continually back to those footsteps. He just wanted to stop thinking and go to sleep. He’d finally managed to make himself uncomfortable with these silly ghost stories and he was disgusted with himself for acting so childish.
After a while of staring at the shadow on the floor, he realized that he wasn’t sure what it was. Was it a blanket? He didn’t think he’d left any clothes there. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t remember there being anything lying on the floor beside the bed when he turned off the light.
He reached across his nightstand and switched on the lamp. There, right before his face, was a terrible, gnarled thing with black and putrid flesh. It was reaching toward him, almost touching him.
Startled, he cried out and scrambled away from the horrible thing. He leapt from the bed, tripping himself on the sheets, and staggered across the floor, his heart pounding in his chest.
What the hell was that? It was there for only an instant, but he vividly remembered huge, bulging eyeballs and a gaping mouth. It had appeared vaguely human, but also so terribly twisted and deformed that it could not possibly have been anything alive.
His back to the wall, he circled the room, keeping his eyes on the bed. He half-expected the horrible thing to come scurrying out at him from beneath it. But as he came around the foot of the bed, he found that there was nothing on the floor. Whatever that thing was, it had vanished.
Had he dreamed it? It was so vivid, so real. How could he have only imagined it? He stared at the bed itself, at the frilly bed skirt that concealed the underside. Could it have crawled under there?
He moved toward the bed, meaning to lift the skirt and peer underneath. But he didn’t want to look. He felt the hairs on his neck standing up as his mind conjured an image of the horrible thing lurching out at him, snapping and snarling. It was as if he were a child again, lying frozen beneath the sheets, too frightened to reach across the darkness and turn on the lamp for fear that something was merely waiting for the opportunity to snatch at his exposed flesh.
He remembered the twisted, misshapen thing that was reaching toward his face when the light came on. There were fingers, but it was not a hand. Not really. It was like nothing he could ever describe.
A chill raced through him, and he pulled his hand back. He didn’t want to look under there. He didn’t want to see what might be hiding in the shadows. And as he stepped back, he imagined that he saw the fabric move.
He turned and quickly descended the stairs, turning the lights on as he went. He stopped in the dining room, trying to calm himself. What was going on? He couldn’t possibly have seen…whatever that was. It was just a nightmare. That was all. He couldn’t have really seen it because what he saw made no sense. It looked like a moldy corpse, but with no proper proportion or shape.
Upstairs, he heard the floorboards creak again. He looked up and followed them across the ceiling. It was headed for the stairs.
He couldn’t take this. He refused to live like a frightened child in his own home. He turned back toward the stairs, intending to intercept the phantom footsteps and prove to himself that there was nothing there. But as he crossed the room, the footsteps reached the top landing and he looked up through the railing. A pale foot dropped onto the topmost step, freezing him in his tracks.
As quickly as it appeared, it was gone. There was nothing on the stairs. Not a sound could be heard. Had he really seen it?
Every rational thought in his head told him to go upstairs and look. He knew he would find nothing because there was nothing up there. But he found himself too afraid to move forward. A small child deep inside him kept telling him that something horrible was now up there, something that meant him terrible harm.
He was tired. He was unnerved. He turned away from the stairs, unwilling to face these strange, imaginary things. He went to the living room instead and turned on the television. He curled up on the couch, beneath Selena’s favorite throw.
He hadn’t felt so helpless and afraid since he was a small boy. He even pulled his feet up as he watched television, unable to shake that childish thought that something might be lurking beneath the couch, just waiting to snatch at his vulnerable toes.
After a while, he fell asleep. And when he awoke, the sun was already over the horizon and shining brightly through the windows.
He felt foolish. What had gotten into him last night? He arose from the couch, turned the television off and made himself some coffee. He sat down at the table with his mug and mulled over the things he’d seen and heard the day before. The more he thought about it, the less frightened he felt. What he felt instead was angry. Perhaps he was losing his mind, but he didn’t think so.
The strange experiences he’d been having weren’t just random. They all connected back to the same common event. Something had been going on in this house ever since Selena heard that strange noise from the spare bedroom.
It was time to get to the bottom of it.
He started upstairs with the master bedroom. He peered under the bed, where he was too afraid to look last night, and found nothing but a couple of storage bins and two of Kikki’s toy mice. He then went through the closet. Everything was as it was supposed to be. So was the upstairs bathroom. Nothing horrible was crouching behind the shower curtain. Nothing floated in the water beneath the toilet lid. The linen closet contained no cackling corpses.
He moved downstairs and started in the spare bedroom. The closet door was open again. He went inside and pawed through the winter coats and the boxes, moving everything around. He closed the closet door firmly and checked under the bed. He made his way thoroughly across the first floor, checking every corner of the living room and the dining room, the office, the kitchen, the bathroom. He went through every closet, every cupboard, every shelf, convincing himself that there was nothing here that shouldn’t be. He found no portals to hell, no magic doorways. It was nothing more than a perfectly ordinary house, as it had been for the past six years.
Finally finished, he opened the basement door. This was the only place in the house he hadn’t spent much time in the past few weeks. If there was something out of the ordinary, this was likely where it would be.
At one end of the basement was a workbench. The rest of the room was occupied by boxes and bins and miscellaneous junk. At the other end of the basement, in the far back, was an old door that led into the oldest part of the basement. They didn’t even use that part of the house. He couldn’t remember the last time he went back there.
But that was the farthest side of the house from where Selena heard the noise, so he began at the work bench, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Perhaps something fell and spilled. Maybe all these perceived supernatural activities were really just hallucinations brought on by some noxious mix of chemicals in the air.
It was a good theory, he supposed. But in truth, he just didn’t have very much in the way of chemicals lying around. And nothing seemed to have fallen or broken.
He found nothing, not even signs of rodents. And soon all that remained was the creepy little room at the back of the basement. He moved toward the door, determined. Surely the answer to all this weirdness would be in there.
Of course he’d seen more than enough horror movies to know that if something terrible was going to happen, it would happen in there.
He pushed the door open and stepped into the shadows of the room. The only light in here was from a bare bulb in the middle of the ceiling. To turn it on, one was forced to make his way to the middle of the room in the dark, passing through cobwebs along the way.
But nothing ate him as he made his wa
y into the darkness, and when he pulled the chain, there were no monsters waiting to rend his flesh. There was nothing at all, in fact. The room was as empty as the last time he came in here.
But as he stood looking for something to explain Selena’s mystery noise, something did emerge. It reached out from behind him, soft as a shadow, and clutched lightly at his ankle.
Allan cried out and stumbled away. But it was not the foul creature from his bedroom floor the night before. It was not even the most mundane horror that his mind could concoct.
It was Kikki.
She stared up at him with patient, inquisitive eyes. So this was where she’d disappeared to. He lifted her into his arms and she immediately began purring. They weren’t always diligent about closing the basement door. They kept the broom and mop on hooks behind the door, and with no children to worry about, Kikki often enjoyed free access to all three floors of the house.
She seemed to be perfectly healthy, although she might have been a little lighter than usual. He wondered if she’d been making regular trips upstairs to eat. Had she become locked in somehow?
He turned off the light and carried her back to the basement stairs. When he attempted to climb with her, however, she squirmed out of his arms and bolted back into the darkness of the back room.
For a moment he stood there, looking after her. That was strange.
He remembered the way she’d been acting before she disappeared. It was as if she could see something that he couldn’t. And now it appeared she was afraid to even go upstairs.
He went upstairs and retrieved her food and water dish. When he placed them inside the door behind which she was hiding, she buried her face in her food and ate as if she hadn’t enjoyed a bite in days.
This was certainly interesting. This was, hands down, the creepiest place in the entire house, and yet this was where Kikki chose to take refuge. Furthermore, if Kikki was afraid to even venture upstairs now, maybe he wasn’t as crazy as he thought he was.
He knelt beside her for a while, stroking her fur and looking around at the cobwebbed walls and naked joists of this shadowy little neglected room. “Maybe I should start sleeping down here with you, huh?”
He stood up, still thinking about the irony of this shadowy part of the house being the cat’s safe haven, and returned to the first floor. He’d searched every corner of the house now. He didn’t know where else to look, so he returned to the beginning, to the mysterious bang Selena heard from the spare bedroom that night.
The spare bedroom was also where Kikki first appeared to sense something she didn’t like. Cats were playful, but he wouldn’t say that they suffered overactive imaginations. She was genuinely afraid of something, and something had certainly frightened the hell out of him last night. He walked through the living room and into the bedroom and saw that the closet door was wide open again.
And then there was that.
He’d just closed it a little while ago. There was no way anybody else opened it. So why wouldn’t it remain shut?
He walked over to the closet door and reached for the handle to pull it closed again. But just as he was about to grasp the knob, he glimpsed a pair of ghastly fingers slipping into the shadows behind the door.
He cried out and backed away from the door as if he’d just stumbled upon a snake. Horror and revulsion pulsed through him in great, overwhelming waves. His whole body convulsed at the very thought of those awful fingers, so close he had almost touched them.
He fled the spare bedroom and hurried to the bathroom, where he stopped and stared into the bathroom mirror, forcing himself back into control. That was it. The spare bedroom closet. It all started there. It all started with the noise Selena heard from there.
Why? Why was he suddenly being tormented like this? Why now? Why here? The answer was probably in that closet. And he was willing to bet that whatever those fingers belonged to was probably not there any more.
He turned on the faucet and splashed cool water onto his face, trying to steel himself. This was not going to be pleasant, but it needed done. He couldn’t live like this. He refused to be a victim of his own fear. He took a flashlight from the drawer in the kitchen and then returned to the spare bedroom. With a deep breath, he shoved the door open and searched within.
There was nothing here. He shoved the flashlight into his pocket and began moving out the boxes. When they were all out, he took out all the coats and clothes and tossed them onto the bed. Then he began carting out the games and puzzles. He didn’t stop until the closet was as empty as the day they moved in. Then he stood in the middle of the closet and studied every inch of the floor and walls with the flashlight. There must be something in here, some reason for all this.
He tried to think. The bang. The cat. The opening door. The knocking. The footsteps.
That was it! The footsteps. Those started upstairs. Why? He turned his flashlight up and studied the ceiling. There were tiles up there, just like those in the spare bedroom, and likely some kind of space above them. If he remembered correctly, the second floor didn’t extend all the way out over the spare bedroom. There was a portion of roof that just covered this part of the house. That meant there must be an attic space there. And that space would be just behind the wall against which stood the headboard of his and Selena’s bed, just where the knocking noise was heard.
He stuffed the flashlight back into his pocket, hurried down to the basement and returned with a stepladder, which he stood in the middle of the empty closet. He climbed up and examined several of the tiles. Sure enough, one of them moved easily aside, revealing the attic space he’d correctly deduced was there.
He retrieved the flashlight from his pocket and peered into the darkness. Finally, after finding nothing in room after room of the house, he saw something. It was a strange metal box, covered in rust, just sitting there on a piece of plywood nailed across two joists. Its lid was open and an old rusty lock lay broken in front of it.
What it meant, he did not find out. Just then, something attacked him. It seized his hair and began wailing at him in a terrible, yowling voice. He screamed and kicked, dropping the flashlight as he clutched for something to give him leverage. He tried to retreat back down out of the hole, but he was yanked upwards, as though whatever held him was trying to pull him deeper into the darkness.
In his flailing, he knocked over the ladder, and for a moment, he was hanging, screaming from the hole in the ceiling, his feet kicking uselessly at the air. He felt his hair tearing from his scalp.
Then he was falling. He landed on the overturned ladder and collapsed onto it, his leg and back flaring with sudden and excruciating pain.
Desperate and terrified, he crawled from the ladder and out of the closet, wincing at the pain in his body. All around him, chaos was erupting. The carefully stacked boxes he’d moved from the closet to the bedroom began to tumble over as he crawled past them and a terrible shriek reverberated from the tiles overhead.
He rose to his feet and then ran from the bedroom, past the living room and out the front door of the house. Once clear of the front porch, he turned and looked back. He walked backwards, his eyes focused on the open front door where he was sure something terrible and angry would burst from within at any second, until he reached the end of the sidewalk and fell backward into the snow.
For a moment, he only lay there, panting. His heart was hammering in his chest. He wasn’t exactly sure what just happened, but he absolutely knew one thing: he’d pissed it off.
“Are you okay?”
He turned, dazed, and saw his next-door neighbor rushing toward him.
Everything was somewhat hazy for a little while after that. Ted Calder helped him out of the snow, but he only vaguely remembered being led back to Ted’s house. He was delirious, on the verge of hysteria even, but somehow he thought he managed to remain fairly calm, considering what had just happened and the condition he was in. His body hurt from falling onto the ladder, and he was bleeding from several different
scratches on his face and head.
“Where’s Mrs. Tyler?” Ted asked as he bandaged a cut on Allan’s forehead. He was considerably older than Allan, retired, gray-haired, but he possessed an abundance of energy. He was always out in the yard, keeping himself busy, doing something somewhere regardless of the weather. It was his inability to just sit around the house, even on cold days like these, that allowed him the good fortune to be out on the porch when his neighbor came stumbling out into the snow.
“Selena’s out of town,” Allan replied. “She should be home sometime this afternoon.”
Ted nodded. “I see. Well you don’t seem in too bad of shape. You want to tell me what happened?”
Ted didn’t have a clue what was wrong with Allan when he heard the door slam open and watched him stagger out into the snow without so much as a jacket. He thought at first that his neighbor must be suffering a heart attack or some such thing, that he staggered outside into the snow in desperate hope of finding someone to call him an ambulance. But as he rushed to help, he saw the blood running down his face and the strange, terrified expression in his eyes.
This was such a quiet street, even for a small town like this one. Ted could not imagine anything bad happening here, but clearly something unnatural took place inside Allan’s house.
Allan had since assured him that no one had harmed him, that he hadn’t run afoul of a burglar, but he also hadn’t said a word about what did transpire inside his house. Now that he was faced with the question directly, he simply shook his head. “I don’t know. I think I’m just going crazy. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“You’d be amazed at what I’m inclined to believe.”
Allan laughed. “Trust me, I’d be pushing it.”
“Well just try me. I promise I won’t pass any judgment.”
He considered for a moment. What else could he do? He wasn’t sure he even wanted to go back inside his own house now. He absolutely believed that whatever attacked him in the attic above the spare bedroom closet fully intended to kill him. It didn’t just knock him out of the attic, after all. It grabbed him by the hair and tried to drag him in with it.